Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!ames!elroy!david
From: david@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (David Robinson)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: Does GNU emacs ever use shared libraries?
Summary: Done
Message-ID: <15866@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
Date: 12 May 89 20:03:50 GMT
References: <6774.610983941@chips> <8905121552.AA04949@pawl.rpi.edu>
Distribution: gnu
Organization: Image Analysis Systems Grp, JPL
Lines: 31

In article <8905121552.AA04949@pawl.rpi.edu>, tale@PAWL.RPI.EDU (David C Lawrence) writes:
> I forgot to mention one other significant advantage of shared
> libraries in my posting and I will be really surprised if no one
> points this out ... with shared libraries, every programme that used
> them gets a bugfix automatically without the need to recompile.  That
> is certainly a plus.   And as jr pointed out (in mail), space is also
> larger in memory for static programmes than dynamic ones.

I seem to have missed the first part of this so I will assume that
the question was "Why doesn't (or can't) emacs use shared libraries
under SunOS 4.0.

Well I have just finished beta testing a version of 18.53 that uses
shared libraries and an mmap'd data segment and bss instead of unexec().
I claim that this will use less real memory than an unexec'd emacs, I have
even had one tester claim improved performance, this has not been
verified but is possible on machines with limited memory.

As soon as I get the patches up to 18.54 I will send them in to GNU,
it sounded like emacs was frozen for version 18 and all work was
going into version 19, if true I will post the diffs to this list in addition.
[They are fairly small]

	-David


-- 
	David Robinson		elroy!david@csvax.caltech.edu     ARPA
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